Hacker News Reader

Comment by jpalmer | Hacker News Reader

Market cap now exceeds top 5 US hotel chains combined. How much can it grow from here?

Two arguments can be made. On the one hand, there are definitely more private places to be rented out then there are hotel rooms in those 5 chains. On the other hand, I'm not entirely sure that Airbnb can ever be profitable enough with all of those rentable places to justify the cost, especially since much of their stock is misused long term rental capacity that many municipalities are cracking down on now.

So yes, it is rather unlikely that Airbnb will grow enough to justify the market cap. This is tech bubble hype at it's epitome.

The best part about all of this, is that a company called PetCo recently IPO'd as well. https://www.forbes.com/sites/joanverdon/2020/12/04/pets-are-...

So ya, we're probably going to get hurt real bad at some point.

> especially since much of their stock is misused long term rental capacity that many municipalities are cracking down on now.

And thank heavens they are. I've been on the suffering end of trying to find a place to rent before but couldn't due to everyone preferring AirBnB for long term rental properties as they could make more money. I won't say it's the root cause of housing crises in cities worldwide, but it's definitely a major contributor, as you have the same number of people now fighting over less area. The quicker AirBnB gets regulated to go back to being a place to rent out a spare room, the better.

The pandemic makes the impact measurable eg

https://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/pandemic-reveals...

>availability in the rental market has bounced, with 41 per cent more properties for rent nationally and 92 per cent more in Dublin.

>In Dublin availability was almost double what it was a year ago, with nearly 3,000 homes on the rental market on August 1st compared to fewer than 1,600 in August 2019,

> https://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/pandemic-reveals...

It's interesting you quote the Irish Times, as Ireland is where I had my trouble.

> In Dublin availability was almost double what it was a year ago, with nearly 3,000 homes on the rental market on August 1st compared to fewer than 1,600 in August 2019,

It literally doubled the market, something much needed. And there's honestly probably still more where the owners didn't hop back into long-term rent. Hopefully it stays like this next year when I plan to go do a masters. And that the government works on fixing it.

Petco is well established (founded 55 years ago), based primarily in brick and mortar retail, and don't try to market themselves as a tech or "dotcom" company. We may be in a bubble, but I don't think their IPO is comparable to Pets.com of the dotcom era.

Yes they are two quite different companies. I just found it hilariously ironic.

I think the post COVID-19 phase will actually be good for them in that regard. Companies switch to remote, at least a bit and cities will empty a bit more. This might make some more space for permantent tenants. But could be also completely wrong about that.

Based on Airbnb's other product of "experiences", I could see them growing into the broader vacation industry.

I remember a talk by Brian Chesky where he lamented the (pre-COVID) style of travel where tourists just herd into queues at mainstream tourist attractions. Airbnb experiences are supposed to subvert this and create an industry of tourism that is more serendipitous and less standardized.

It's already so easy to do non-standard tourist activities on a vacation that I'm skeptical there is a big opportunity here. All it takes to avoid the standard tourist traps is having interests that influence your travel, talking to locals, or firing up something like Groupon to find something to do in a new area. I've always figured that so many people hit up classic tourist spots because that's what they actually want to do.

That said, I don't have any real insight into the tourism market and won't be shocked if this works out well for Airbnb. I personally try to avoid crowded tourist spots like the plague and this could just be my bias talking.

You and I seem to travel in the same way, but I know many people - even of roughly my generation, late 20s/early 30s, who literally don't know the right tools or communities to plan a trip like that. Its guidebooks, maybe some YouTube videos, and mostly things like Pinterest boards that get used to plan a trip. No trips to the local destination's subreddit, certainly no use of Google Translate to read some local media/magazines, etc.

For a lot of people, "tourist trap" doesn't register as a thing - those are just the things you _do_ when you go to whatever place you're going to.

If Airbnb becomes the safe, convenient, well-marketed way to discover reputable but not stereotypical local experiences in a marketplace that takes your credit card, they could do well IMO.

'Something like Groupon to find something to do' is the pitch though, because actual Groupon isn't the ideal place to find things which are interesting to experience on holiday. (And in many of places asking locals meets with either utter bemusement or a commission-paying introduction to a standard tourist activity)

AirBNB aren't the first people to try this, but they're pretty well placed brand-wise to sell the 'real local experience curated by ordinary local people' image. And yes, in practice it'll leverage that to sell standard tourist activities and some customers will be delighted, just like they use AirBNB to find ideally situated self-catering holiday apartments run as businesses rather than airbeds in suburban spare rooms

Yes this seems reasonable. I used to work for one of the main competitors of Airbnb and this was our strategy for growth outside of our core business of selling hotel "roomnights" until Covid hit.

The margins on flights and attraction tickets are tiny as you might expect, but the idea was this would lead to more growth in our core business since it could all be tied together in one platform. There's also the less well defined but non-zero benefit of data, marketing and so on that this extra visibility provides.

Brian has talked about getting into flights in some capacity. I wonder if dealing with bookings is not their goal but imagine if they had Airbnb louges in major airports. Those traveling with an Airbnb stay booked could access the lounge free of charge. Sort of like a loss leader to promote downstream Airbnb bookings.

>Airbnb experiences are supposed to subvert this and create an industry of tourism that is more serendipitous and less standardized.

Although the experiences I saw were either around (vegan) cooking and stuff or the general stuff that you can book at a normal tourist agency, just a lot more expensive.

Nothing too interesting, just expensive but YMMV.

It's just a marketing talk for airbnb getting into activities booking business.

Booking.com, a major online hotel aggregator and probably more akin to Airbnb than a physical hotel chain, has a market cap of $85B — not far off from Airbnb's $100B.

I don't think individual hotel chains are an equivalent business to Airbnb, since those have high real estate costs and have clear physical hurdles to growth: you have to buy property and build hotels, and staff all of them to run the front desk, carry people's luggage, clean the rooms, do laundry, etc. The comparison to other OTAs like Booking — that don't own the properties but make money from listing them and allowing booking — makes more sense IMO. The valuation looks a lot less frothy with those comparisons.

(I am an ex-Airbnb employee and still hold many shares FWIW.)

I agree, but I also think the valuations of certain OTAs also look frothy compared with digital distribution platforms with comparable cost bases and scale and arguably better moats. Sabre's market cap is under $4bn.

Airbnb’s business model is much more capital efficient than regular hotels. It can grow and respond to market conditions much faster than a hotel, has much lower customer acquisition/marketing costs, and operates in a wider market segment than hotels since extended stay is a much more common use case (yes, you can stay in a hotel for an extended stay, and there are extended stay hotels, but anecdotally I’ve never heard of a consumer paying for that out of pocket unless they are like homeless or temporarily homeless. It’s usually a corporation or insurance paying for it AFAIK).

I still don’t think it necessarily justifies the current market cap.

Airbnb has more rooms, as rafiki6 said, but without the disadvantage of having to own all those rooms. And maintain them. And pay taxes on them, and mortgages.

It's like saying that Google has a higher market cap than the top five content-based web sites. Sure, but... that kind of misses the point, doesn't it?

As others have said, you need to look at growth. You also need to look at margins. Another big difference is a lot of hotel chains are a mix of franchised-out locations and owned-and-operated locations. Airbnb is effectively "franchised," but I'm not sure how different their take is compared to a Motel 6. There's also a question of how much pandemic behaviors will stick.

I have no idea. 8 years ago I liked Airbnb but now with the stupidly high cleaning fees despite having some boomer host tell me that I'm "disrespectful" for not leaving the place spotless I've switched back to hotels.

However much speculators see fit to participate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com